Assessing E-retailer’s Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Details

• Creators:
  Jaller, Miguel ; Pahwa, Anmol
• Corporate Creators:
  University of California, Davis. Institute of Transportation Studies
• Corporate Contributors:
  University of California Institute of Transportation Studies
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  COVID-19 Demand Disaster Resilience Electronic Commerce Empirical Methods Last Mile Pickup And Delivery Service Third Party Logistics Providers
• Publication/ Report Number:
  UC-ITS-2021-06
• DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.7922/G20G3HGR
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  United States
• Edition:
  Final Research Report (July 2020 — March 2022)
• Corporate Publisher:
  University of California Institute of Transportation Studies
• Abstract:
  The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant breakdown of the traditional retail sector, resulting in a substantial surge in ecommerce demand for the delivery of essential goods. The e-retailers coped with this surge in demand, albeit while operating at a much lower level of service than usual, by outsourcing part of their operations through: crowdsourced delivery fleets, alternative pickup/delivery locations, 3rd party logistics service providers, etc. Given e-retailers’ role in the supply of essential goods, the pandemic raised concerns pertaining to e-retailers’ ability to maintain and efficiently restore level of service in similar market disruptions. This study assesses the resilience of last-mile distribution operations under disruptions, by integrating a continuous approximation–based last-mile distribution model; the resilience triangle concept; and the Robustness, Redundancy, Resourcefulness, and Rapidity (R4) resilience framework. The resulting integrated tool, the R4 Resilience Triangle Framework, is a novel performance-based qualitative-cum-quantitative domain-agnostic framework (where “domain” means “discipline,” such as engineering, economics, etc.). Through a set of empirical analyses, this study highlights the opportunities and challenges of different distribution/outsourcing strategies to cope with disruption. For example, the study analyzed the use of an independent crowdsourced fleet (flexible service contingent on driver availability); the use of collection-point pickup (unconstrained downstream capacity contingent on customer willingness to self-collect); and integration with a logistics service provider (reliable service with high distribution costs). Overall, the e-retailers must create a suitable platform to ensure reliable crowdsourced deliveries, position sufficient collection-points to ensure customer willingness to self-collect, and negotiate contracts with several logistics service providers to ensure adequate backup distribution.
• Format:
  PDF
• Funding:
  UC-ITS-2021-06
• Collection(s):
  US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:808b6009279ce65990b25cc6901731aa65c49e6bbeef384fc24c45af39f6bb80298599d45841ccf35958cbbfd81a46f919c2281c8d92ab850300746b2a94f95c
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/65501/dot_65501_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.44 MB ]